Congo’s fragile forests watched over with online map

Putting logging on the map

(Image: Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures)

THE Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is home to the second largest tropical forest on Earth. Now an online digital mapping system called Moabi is letting people view how the land is being used, to help protect the area from over-exploitation.

Forests are vital sources of biodiversity, as well being huge carbon sinks and providing oxygen, but logging and mining operations can threaten these ecosystems. The idea of the online map is to find a balance between preserving the forest and allowing responsible operations to continue. It is designed to increase transparency, so local citizens and international groups alike are informed about land use.

“The idea is to find a balance between preserving the forest and allowing responsible logging”

Launched on 22 April, Moabi overlays maps of the DRC, built as part of the crowdsourced mapping project OpenStreetMap, with information from the country’s government on where activities like mining, drilling, forestry, agriculture and road-building are planned. The system shows where such usage overlaps with areas of forest that the UN protects as part of its REDD project, which pays regional governments to keep tracts of forest intact.

However, the project has limited funding and the economic pressure to develop forest areas is great, says Constance McDermott, who studies forest governance at the University of Oxford. “The challenge with a lot of REDD projects right now is that the resources they are offering are not enough to compete with minerals or oil.”

As a result, every year between 1990 and 2010, the DRC lost an average of 3110 square kilometres of forest. The rate of deforestation, 0.20 per cent per year, is actually much lower than that in Brazil or Indonesia. But Moabi’s founder, Leo Bottrill, worries that it could speed up as the DRC’s economy grows.

At the moment, Bottrill relies on government and non-governmental organisations for his data, but he wants locals to start contributing information from on-the-ground observation. “Through 3G and cellphones, the internet is spreading and improving in the DRC – it is amazing how quickly mapping is becoming accessible.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Online map keeps an eye on fragile forests”